Mobile World Congress 2010 is going on in Spain right now and so far, there have been significant announcements and unveilings of new products at the show. LTE and other 4G services and devices are big topics at the show this year.

Verizon Wireless made a big LTE announcement at MWC. The company has confirmed that it is on track to offer LTE services in 25 to 30 cities around the country by the end of 2010. Verizon has in the past used CDMA technology in its network, and LTE marks the first GSM-family technology that Verizon has adopted.

Verizon CTO Dick Lynch said, "It [LTE testing] is on track. We’re currently on phase four — the final phase — of the trials in Boston and Seattle and in 60 days they will be fully passed in terms of testing before we start the commercial infrastructure roll-out in a big way."

Verizon plans to offer LTE in using back-end equipment from Starent and Nokia. Verizon has been working on trial installations and has thoroughly tested the system with streaming video and found voice services were easier to do than expected. The cities planned for LTE rollout in 2010 will give access to 100 million people.

Lynch added, "We have a single spectrum across the US. I’m confident that this [initial rollout of LTE] is readily doable."

AT&T announced last week that it was ramping up for its LTE rollout and has signed an agreement with Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson for LTE hardware. AT&T will get 3G devices from the two companies this year that can be easily upgraded to 4G LTE capability later when the time to introduce LTE is at hand.

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